Architects, builders, and real estate developers have been building scaled physical representations (models) of their design concepts for centuries to help them both develop their design and communicate that design to their clients. These models typically involve the fabrication of a building model (typically a residential house or commercial building), the fabrication of a site model of the property's terrain, and the placement of miniature facsimile trees and/or shrubs on the site model.
The building model is a scaled three dimensional model that represents the architect's design of the proposed building. These building models have traditionally been fabricated by hand using cardboard-type materials (“chipboard” is a popular medium) by architects and/or model builders using X-ACTO® knives and glue to manufacture a miniature scaled model of the building design. Other materials can also be used such as plastics or metals, which are often cut to size using laser cutters.
The site models are typically scaled topographical representations of the land on which the building is to be constructed. The typical approach to constructing these site models is to cut out and stack-up cardboard layers, with each cut out layer representing a land elevation contour.
Once the building model and site model have been integrated together to form a combined model, the final assembly stage of the combined model is the placement of miniature foliage representing trees and/or shrubs. The miniature foliage may be simply decorative (i.e., randomly place on the site model with no correlation to the actual location of plants), or it may be a representation of the actual positioning of foliage that is intended to occupy the site with the building as part of an architect's landscape design.
The traditional methodology for attaching model foliage as scaled representations of trees and/or shrubs to the model has been to either permanently glue the Foliage to the Site Model or wedge/jam the Foliage into holes or receptacles formed in the site model. Site surveys are sometimes conducted to establish foliage location, however, often this activity does not occur resulting in haphazard model foliage placement. This traditional approach of permanently securing the foliage to the site model is shown in FIG. 1.
The problem with this traditional approach is that the model foliage placement on the site model portion of the architectural model often obscures views of design features of the building model portion of the architectural model. When this happens it can be difficult to evaluate the building model without removing the foliage from the site model. However, since the foliage is often either permanently attached or difficult to remove and later replace, there is no convenient method for easily evaluating the overall model iteratively both with and without foliage.